$3.8 billion Slack's chief marketing officer quietly stepped down after less than two years

Former Slack CMO and CRO Bill Maciatis
Slack
Slack's head of marketing has quietly stepped down after two years on the job, leaving a key position at the $3.8 billion startup unfilled just as it faces tough new competitors.

A Slack representative confirmed to Business Insider that the company has not yet replaced Macaitis.

"Bill continues to be closely engaged with Slack, and is also following a passion of his to mentor other high growth startups by serving as formal board members and advisor roles," says a Slack spokesperson. Macaitis' LinkedIn bio, which notes that he had also served Chief Revenue Officer, says he remains on Slack's board of directors.

"Board and Advisor roles also give me a little more flexibility for time with the family while still allowing me to stay actively involved in the SaaS space which I love so much," Macaitis tells Business Insider. "I have a deep passion for igniting and scaling growth at companies and it's fun to mentor and guide other startups."

The change comes at a time when Slack is battling two new big-name competitors, with Facebook's new Workplace service and Microsoft's Teams products both aiming to scoop up the business users that have flocked to Slack's messaging platform.

The lack of an experienced marketing leader could prove tricky for Slack as it looks to set itself apart from the competition.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield
Slack

On Wednesday Slack published a full-page advertisement in The New York Times "welcoming" its new rival Microsoft to the enterprise chat market. The ad got plenty of attention, but was also criticized for making the startup appear overly defensive and not in keeping with Slack's friendly brand image, embodied by founder Stewart Butterfield.

And, in general, Slack says that it's growing like crazy, with 650 employees and counting across its four global offices — 15% of whom joined in the last 45 days. Slack also says that it's expecting another 100 people to join in the very short term.

Slack
Slack
For its part, Slack now says that Uber was only ever testing its product with a small group of its then-6,000 employees, and it just never went past that experimentation stage. In general, Slack says, it's dealing with customers larger than Uber was at that time, every day.

"Slack also has customers like IBM with more than 30,000 daily active users who rely on Slack to get their jobs done. That's 5x the total size of Uber at the time they evaluated Slack and at a company with 6,300% more employees than Uber did," says a Slack spokesperson.